Turn of the Cards by George R. R. Martin, Victor Milan Read Free Book Online

arched front door into the evening, and away.
     
    The naked pink neon woman bent over. The naked blue neon man leaped forward in an arc and thrust his prominently erect member into her from behind. Mark decided they were doing some pretty radical things with neon these days. A ripening of the breeze drove the rain into him where he huddled in the doorway. The rain pitted the surface of the canal with dark saucers and made the big purple, pink, and magenta oblongs of light tossed onto the water from the houses’ big front windows waver and bobble like ectoplasm. Mark shuddered, hugged himself with hands that felt inside and out like the cold wet hands of a statue.
    Dutch households liked to leave their front curtains open so that passersby could admire the bourgeois splendor of their decor. The houses that lined the block away from the porn shop with the interesting and educational neon sign were no exception. It was the interior design that was unusual.
    In each window sat a woman. Each was scantily clad, in costumes weighted heavily to garter belts and housecoats, though some outfits were tuned to the fetishist eye: a nurse, two nuns, and a probably Indonesian woman in chiffon and fake feathers that Mark had an awful suspicion was supposed to suggest a Native American princess.
    The babes looked bored. Several did needlepoint, a couple read, and the Indian maid had a laptop computer propped on her thin bare thighs. Mark wasn’t sure how they managed to read in the gloom. The rows of garishly if inadequately lit windows reminded him irresistibly of the aquariums they used to have in cheap lounges back in the early sixties.
    It was a poor night for business. No tourists were braving the rain to gawk at the cellulite on display, not even your usually indefatigably horny Japanese businessmen. Even as Mark watched, one of the nuns took off her headgear, tossed it in a corner, and drew the frilly drapes with a flourish of disgust.
    He had heard somewhere that whorehouses sometimes offered the cheapest accommodations. Maybe that was true. The problem was, these weren’t whorehouses, and the occupants depended on rapid turnover, even if they weren’t getting much tonight. He somehow doubted any of them would be in a mood to cut a deal on crash space alone.
    He craned his head out of the doorway that provided him largely symbolic shelter. No break in the weather. Maybe he’d drift back to the warehouse and see if any watchmen had yet spotted the window he’d jimmied to get out of his last night’s lie-up.
    Sprout was a million miles away. Tomorrow morning didn’t seem much closer.
    At least there weren’t any stars.
     
    “Cocaine? Hashish? Heroin?”
    Mark put his head down to avoid eye contact and practiced his broken-field running, trying to dodge the West African blacks doing the Leidseplein caracole on those funky bikes with the handlebars turned upside-down, like steer horns.
    He was on his way to Vondel Park, just south of Leyden Square. You couldn’t crash in the huge park anymore, thanks to abuse of the privilege by the trend-followers and wannabes who appropriated the name “hippies” during the mid-seventies. It was still a major nexus for the European counterculture.
    Mark, of course, had never actually been a member of the counterculture. That was his curse; that was the dramatic irony of his life. From the time he first discovered the glories of the counterculture, as a flat-topped biochemistry major in high-water pants in the fall of 1969, through his days as Cap’n Trips, the ace with the purple Uncle Sara suit and no visible powers whose not-so-secret secret identity was the mild-mannered owner of the last head shop on Manhattan Island, Mark’s journey had been a personal one. He had never actually participated to any extent in the Movement.
    Of course, maybe that was why he was still keeping the faith in the early 1990s, when all others were become stockbrokers and informers. Mark didn’t think that